It perhaps says something about the Coen brothers’ respective sensibilities that, when older sibling Joel went off to make 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth in black and white with wife Frances McDormand, younger brother Ethan chose to dust off a raunchy crime romp he had written with his wife 20 years ago and shoot it in eye-popping color.
A freewheeling road movie about two queer chums being pursued by hoods from Pennsylvania to Florida, Drive-Away Dolls is definitely not Shakespeare. But it is unmistakably a Coen(s) film, albeit one that feels more like a pastiche of their previous pictures than the innovative next chapter in their eclectic collective oeuvre.
